Hopeful Living

Bishop Scott Bullock
The Third Sunday in Advent
December 14, 2025

A man approached a little league baseball game one afternoon. He asked a boy in the dugout what the score was. The boy responded, “Eighteen to nothing. We’re behind.”  

“Boy,” said the spectator, “I’ll bet you’re discouraged.”  

And the boy said, “Why should I be discouraged? We haven’t even been up to bat yet!” 

That’s what I call optimism! Optimism. Is this a quality of a Christian?

Well, what is optimism? According to the Oxford English Dictionary, optimism is a philosophical outlook, which suggests that “the actual world is the best of all possible worlds.” Or a view or belief which assumes the ultimate predominance of good over evil in the universe will be victorious. That in this world our efforts can be perfected. All we need to do is to look around this world to see clearly that this is not “the best of all possible worlds” and that good is victorious over evil in the universe but not always. In its classic sense, then, the Christian is not specifically meant to be optimistic; instead, to be precise. 

The Christian is not meant to be optimistic, but hopeful. What is this hope and how is it different than being optimistic? It’s the quality of waiting in expectation for something that we desire. That’s what hope is. The difference is optimism is about what we do; hope is about what God does. 

The optimist expects that all can be perfected. That he or she is ready to do whatever is necessary to bring it about. The hopeful person instead waits in expectation for a desired result to come about, ultimately in a way that does not depend on him or her. So, this is a critical difference that has made a great deal of difference to a great deal of people. 

In summary, the optimist lives for this world, while the hopeful person lives in this world with the next in mind. We as followers of Jesus are then to be hopeful persons, who live in this world with the next one in mind. 

So, does this mean that the Christian lives for heaven instead of this world resulting in a dangerous neglect of the world? Well, in fact, that is not the case. The optimist who lives only for this world is the most dangerous force in all of our history. There are people who are “optimists” like Adolph Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, who, being optimistic about their vision and lived with the expectation of perfecting this world according to their visions, and this wrecked and wreaked havoc and misery on the world. For once, we think the goal is to live and perfect this world, and will employ any means to that end. As Lenin famously said about his revolution, “You have to crack a few eggs to make an omelet.”

For him, those few “eggs” were 10-20 million killed. Or Hitler’s six million victims in concentration camps. Or Mao’s perhaps 45 million killed in his revolution in the 50s and 60s.

The Christian doesn’t look at the world that way, of course, but rather is hopeful that God can perfect this world and lead us to eternity. 

The scriptures of today — and Advent in general — call us to this hopeful living. The prophet Isaiah promises, “The desert and the parched land will exult; the steppe will rejoice and bloom.”  

And St. Paul counsels us to cling to God’s promises in hope: “Be patient, brothers and sisters, until the coming of the Lord.” 

The call of the Christian life is to trust that, as we live in this world, we’re not perfected, but to live with eternal life in perfection in mind. How do we do this? I think above all, we do this by treating other human beings with the truth that they have eternal souls and an everlasting dignity. It’s this hopeful vision that has led, almost paradoxically, to the greatest humanitarian successes in this world. People like Dorothy Day, or Mother Teresa, or Martin Luther King Jr., all saw the eternal dignity of persons in this world but created in God’s image. And with this hope, they unleashed unparalleled goodness in the world.

So, we can only live hopeful lives with God’s help. Hope is seen by our faith as a theological virtue — that’s, a habitual way, a practiced way of living, only possible with God’s grace.

So, now as we come to the Eucharist, our sure and certain sign of the hope that life is about more than just this world, that life is a foretaste of something more, let’s let this infusion of God’s grace empower us to live with hope. As we’re waiting for something more, and, while we wait, we resist every effort to diminish others to be anything less than who they are, created in their eternal, magnificent dignity. Persons created in God’s image.

With God’s grace, let us live this next week as people of hope. Primarily by seeing each person — our spouse, our children, the driver on the road who passed us, the fellow shoppers, our co-workers — let us see them all as God sees them — with eyes of eternity. That they have a dignity, an eternal dignity, despite any failings for they have been created in God’s eternal image for eternal life.  

Yes, let’s go this week into hope — seeking not so much what we can do for this world, but rather seeking to discover what our God can do through us — his eternal promises for all of his beloved children. For while we might look at this world now and feel like we’re behind the game, something like 18-0, let’s hope in confidence that God still has some sacred work that is yet undone.